Kids program their own adventures at iD Tech Camps in Pomona

POMONA -- They sat quietly in an air-conditioned room decorated with images of video game characters and icons tapping away at their keyboards: This is summer camp in 2013.

Almost two dozen students, ages 7 through 17, were sitting in a rented computer lab at Cal Poly Pomona taking part in iD Tech Camps' two-week programming and game design camps.

"I did a little programming before I got here," said Charlie Heatherly, 10, of Monrovia.

Heatherly was using object-oriented programming - the programming equivalent of assembling a program with Lego bricks - to build "Operation: Pancake," a Flash-based game featuring a stack of pancakes jumping and shooting its way through a world with the bright colors of a Super Mario Bros. game. (Although students can build their own art assets, like Heatherly's Pancake Man, they can also use clip art to speed up the game-building process.)

"My parents heard about it and I said it sounded like fun," he said. "And it is fun - I wanted to stay here more than a week."

The camper programming next to him, 7-year-old Frankie Mossman of La Verne, has wanted to be a game designer most of his life - since he was 2 years old, he said.

It's not all sitting in front of a keyboard: The students also engage in traditional camp activities on the Cal Poly campus, but programming is the clear start of the show.

Camper Alexis Finley, 9, of West Covina, was working on "Chocolate Brick."

"It's a game where you can break the chocolate," she said. "I wanted to make a brick-breaking game, because I'm really into those."

She was programming the bouncing piece of candy fired at blocks of milk, dark and white chocolate to interact with the user-controlled paddle and when it should bounce off the edge of the screen and when it should go out of bounds.

Although Finley also aspires to more stereotypical female ambitions - film director or actor, become a fashion designer with her own company -her programming and engineering ambitions (she would like to work in product testing for toys) are approved of by her female peers: "They think it's cool."

The camp was run by counselors with degrees in relevant fields, including head counselor Neal Terrell, who teaches computer science at Cal State Long Beach.

"This takes them from pretty basic (computing) to probably second-semester college computing course levels," Terrell said, surveying a room full of high school students.

Not every student came to camp wanting to be a programmer:

"My mom was like, 'You play games, you should at least know how to make games,'" said Daniel Zhou, 14, of Diamond Bar. "My old plan was to go into pro gaming."

But after a week of using tools to build new levels for existing video games, Zhou has had his eyes opened.

"It makes you look at it in a different way," he said. "It's not as easy as it looks."